Rodents are one of the major biological production constraints of paddy. Field experiments were carried out to evaluate the efficacy of seven different integrated rodent management modules against rodent pests in irrigated rice ecosystem during kharif and rabi seasons of 2011-12. The modules efficacy was assessed by live burrow count and diagonal methods simultaneously before and after impositi...

Male fiddler crabs (genus Uca) have an enlarged major claw that is used during fights. In most species, 50% of males have a major claw on the left and 50% on the right. In Uca vocans vomeris, however, less than 1.4% of males are left-clawed. Fights between opponents with claws on the same or opposite side result in different physical alignment of claws, which affects fighting tactics. Left-claw...

Burrowing through marine sediments has been considered to be much more energetically expensive than other forms of locomotion, but previous studies were based solely on external work calculations and lacked an understanding of the mechanical responses of sediments to forces applied by burrowers. Muddy sediments are elastic solids through which worms extend crack-shaped burrows by fracture. Here...

Dispersal is an important component in the demography of animal populations. Many animals show seasonal changes in their tendency to disperse, reflecting changes in resource availability, mating opportunities, or in population age structure at the time when new offspring enter the population. Understanding when and why dispersal occurs can be important for the management of endangered species. ...

Gunnison's prairie dogs have a complex alarm communication system. We show that the escape responses of prairie dogs to naturally occurring live predators differed depending upon the species of predator. We also show that playbacks of alarm calls that were elicited originally by the live predators produced the same escape responses as the live predators themselves. The escape responses fell int...

Animals can locate their present position in relation to a starting point and return to that starting point using cues generated by self-movement, a navigation strategy called dead-reckoning. Because contemporary research on spatial navigation suggests that some aspects of spatial navigation depend on the integrity of the hippocampal formation, whereas others do not, the present study examined ...

R EFLECTANCECONFOCALMICROSCOPY(RCM) represents a novel technique for the in vivo visualizationoftheskinatanearlyhistologic resolution. We investigated the possibility of detecting Sarcoptes scabiei using RCM. Three patients with lesions suggestive of scabies were examined by RCM. On confocal images, S scabiei appeared as an ovoid body with a dorsal surface marked by refractive bristles and spin...

The wolf spider Lycosa tarantula homes using path integration. The angular component of the displacement is measured using a polarized-light compass associated with the functioning of the anterior median eyes. However, how L. tarantula estimates the linear component of the displacement was not known prior to this investigation. The ability of L. tarantula to gauge the distance walked after bein...

Food-storage behaviors can be plastic for food-hoarding species. Some hibernating, granivorous rodents switch seasonally from scatter hoarding (storing food in small, separate caches) to larder hoarding (concentrating food in a central location). To date, little is known about seasonal food-hoarding behaviors of free-living rodents that forage and store food year-round (i.e., nonhibernators). U...

Organic matter (OM) production and degradation is important in coastal estuaries, and OM fate is strongly influenced by the coupled interactions of bioturbation and biogeochemistry. From April to September 2013 sediment cores and a benthic observing system, Wormcam, were used to investigate the in situ relationship of biogeochemistry and macrofauna bioturbation in Cape Lookout Bight North Carol...